Traditionally, coal pulverizers have been controlled using the concept of load line defining the relation between the coal feed “CF” (kg/second) and primary air “PA” (m3/second) flow. The load line is selected to guarantee reliable and acceptable operations of the mill, based on conservative, worst case scenario both in terms of mill grinding element wear during a maintenance cycle as well as in terms of varying coal properties. However, this load line control strategy fails to take into account the dynamics of the coal pulverizing and transport process. The load line concept relies on a one-to-one mapping between the combination of CF and PA flows to a pulverized fuel “PF” flow. The relationship of the combination of CF and PA to PF is well defined only in a coal mill steady-state condition. Otherwise, the PF flow may differ from the CF flow considerably. Moreover, the conservative approach is not optimal from the point of view of mill economy—minimization of overall energy consumption of coal pulverizing and transport.